A snow-capped mountain 418 miles away has busied up the new year
for some Fairbanks scientists.

After working the Martin Luther
King Jr. Day weekend, Jon Dehn hurried back into the office Tuesday
morning when a seismologist called him to say Augustine Volcano
was again rumbling. Dehn drove into work at the Geophysical Institute
at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. The institute is home
of the Fairbanks branch of the Alaska Volcano Observatory, a
joint program of the United States Geological Survey, the Alaska
Division of Geological and Geophysical Surveys and the Geophysical
Institute. On his computer, Dehn called up a NOAA weather satellite
image that showed a hotspot at the 4,000-foot summit of the cone-shaped
volcano. Dehn, a remote-sensing specialist at the volcano observatory,
called his AVO colleagues in Anchorage and told them that the
satellite, orbiting Earth about 850 miles above the mountain
and sending information to a satellite dish at the Geophysical
Institute, had confirmed the eruption.

Jon Dehn of the Alaska
Volcano Observatory looks at satellite images a few hours after
an explosive eruption on Augustine Volcano in Cook Inlet on January
17, 2006.
Ned Rozell photo.

In a different office about 100 yards away, volcano seismologist
Steve McNutt spoke to a reporter for CBS news who wanted an image
of the volcano, which had just erupted for the ninth time in
less than a week. McNutt had driven into work at 4 a.m. twice
in the past week because of Augustine. Augustine and many other
Alaska volcanoes have seismometers cemented into them that send
instantaneous data back to Anchorage and Fairbanks offices of
the Alaska Volcano Observatory.

Just down the hall from McNutt,
Guy Tytgat looked at his computer and saw that the pressure sensor
he had installed on Augustine Island in early January 2006 had
endured to record that morning's eruption. The sensor recorded
the drastic change in air pressure from Tuesday morning's explosive
eruption.

Four floors above Tytgat in
the Geophysical Institute, Buck Wilson saw the same signal, which
took about 40 minutes to travel through the air from Augustine
to the UAF campus, where a network of infrasound microphones
are spread in the woods. Infrasound waves-generated by explosions,
extreme storms, and even the aurora-travel across the globe at
frequencies too low for people to hear.

John Eichelberger of
the Alaska Volcano Observatory took this photo of Augustine on
Jan. 18, 2006. Taken from the southwest, the photo shows new
pyroclastic flows and that
the snow that was on the mountain has disappeared.
John Eichelberger photo.

A few floors down from Wilson, another scientist was looking
Tuesday to see if Augustine had puffed up. Jeff Freymueller of
the Geophysical Institute checked precise GPS receivers installed
on the mountain for signs that magma (molten rock within the
mountain) was building up within the volcano, causing it to inflate.

The volcano destroyed two GPS
stations near its summit, but Freymueller checked the three surviving
instruments on Augustine about 10 times on Tuesday, starting
when he got out of bed, continuing until he left work, and then
once more before he went to bed. He saw no changes; increases
of several centimeters in the elevation of the volcano could
indicate a big pulse of magma that might precede another large
eruption.

Later on Tuesday afternoon,
Jon Dehn sipped a Diet Coke after he and colleague Ken Dean sent
a map of predicted ash cloud movement to the Air Force Weather
Agency in Omaha, Nebraska. On Friday and Saturday, they had tracked
six different ash clouds from Augustine.

Bleary-eyed after a string
of 12-hour days, Dehn walked into a room with 11 full-size computer
screens, most with views of the volcano from orbiting satellites.
One screen showed icons of planes coming in and out of Anchorage.
Earlier Tuesday, Dehn and his colleagues watched that screen
as pilots reacted to their predictions of ash cloud movement.

"It's rewarding when you
come in here and watch jets change their course," he said.
"We are the world leader when it comes to this (detailed
volcano monitoring). We have to be, because we have so many volcanoes
that planes fly over."